E. O. Wilson Quotes

Cultural views often don't move at all for a very long time, but when they move they can move very fast.

Latin Americans glorify their past so ceaselessly that they make it almost impossible to advocate change.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

People believe what they want to believe.

We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.

Every generation challenges the one that goes before.

We have traditions, attitudes, an attachment to social welfare and even if change is desirable, we won’t accept change overnight.

The sudden political revolutions which strike the historian most forcibly are often the least important. The great revolutions are those of manners and thought. The true revolutions, those which transform the destinies of people, are most frequently accomplished so slowly that the historians can hardly point to their beginnings. Scientific revolutions are by far the most important.

History shows us that the youth are usually a step ahead of their elders when change is required.

It is hard to oppose an ideology with a tradition.

Every new theory encounters opposition and rejection at first. The adherents of the old, accepted doctrine object to the new theory, refuse it recognition, and declare it to be mistaken. Years, even decades, must pass before it succeeds in supplanting the old one. A new generation must grow up before its victory is decisive.

The historical method is often deemed conservative, because it traces the gradual and stately growth of our venerable institutions; but it may exercise a precisely opposite influence by showing the gross injustice which was blindly perpetrated during this growth.

The Chinese move very slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.

Generally, people don't change their minds about fundamentally deeply held beliefs; it doesn't happen in an instant - it's a process.